Stuart Elliott: Roger Enrico and the Cola Wars

One of the fiercest and most clever cola warriors died last week The legendary Roger Enrico the executive who directed the Pepsi brand39s aggressive efforts to dislodge Coke from its firstplace perch among American consumers His passing generated an outpouring of tributes from Purchase NY where PepsiCo is based Madison Avenue where Enrico worked with a phalanx of agency professionals on his rulebreaking risktaking campaigns and even Atlanta where his longtime archrival has its headquartersIn a fullpage ad in The New York Times the CocaCola Company declared quotRemembering and honoring the lifeamp160of a true leader passionate competitor and an incredible human beingquotThat praise was echoed on Facebook by John Sicher the longtime editor and publisher of the authoritative trade newsletter Beverage Digest He described Enrico as quota very interesting and a very creative person With great leadership skills And decency A combination not commonly occurringquotEnrico39s strategy and tactics rewrote the marketing playbook for packaged goods and challenger brands He built on the work of previous Pepsi trailblazers especially John Sculley who championed the quotPepsi Challengequot blind taste tests that Pepsi always won over Coke and Alan Pottasch who developed the concept of the quotPepsi Generationquot which eschewed extolling the virtues of the product in favor of celebrating the lifestyle of its consumersWorking with Phil Dusenberry and other creative geniuses at BBDO Enrico took the quotPepsi Generationquot a step beyond proclaiming in 1984 that Pepsi was quotthe choice of a new generationquot He sought to prove it by signing up a lengthy list of contemporary youthful celebrities as Pepsi endorsers most notably Michael Jackson Michael J Fox Cindy Crawford Lionel Richie and MadonnaThe intended message Pepsi39s young and fun while Coke39s for old fogies and hasbeens That was underscored with a cutting commercial from BBDO titled quotArchaeologyquot and set quotsometime in the futurequot As a professor escorts his class of Pepsi drinkers through a dig of a quaint 20thcentury home he explains discoveries such as a baseball and a guitar But when a student finds a Coke bottle and asks quotWhat is itquot he39s stumped replying quotI have no ideaquotIt took guts to assert that your competitor who39s actually outselling you in the present will be obsolete and forgotten one day And perhaps it went too far crossing a line from cheekiness to meanness the gods may have interpreted it as hubris and decided that Pepsi would never catch up to Coke in the United States much less surpass itBut Enrico39s agitations certainly provoked Coke into making one of the worst mistakes in marketing history The introduction in 1985 of New Coke The new formula sweeter than its predecessor and thus more like Pepsi was a fast flop forcing mortified Coke executives into bringing back the original as CocaCola ClassicquotThe other guy just blinkedquot Enrico famously riposted in an ad that came out the day New Coke was announced the phrase inspired his 1986 memoir quotThe Other Guy Blinked How Pepsi Won the Cola Warsquot Though Pepsi never has passed Coke you could make a case that Enrico39s continual series of confident marketing moves strengthened Pepsi by drawing attention from No 1 which narrowed the bigger brand39s lead and kept Pepsi fighting onYou also could make a case that Enrico helped create a template for today39s approach to advertising by communicating constantly with current and potential customers stirring the pot all the time with energetic upbeat initiatives in realms such as music and movies Imagine what he would have done with social media and experiential marketingamp160Enrico was quotone of the smartest marketers in the gamequot Karen Benezra who has worked at Cornerstone Capital Nielsen and Brandweek wrote on Facebook quotand a true 39cola warrior39 throughoutquotHe quotencouraged you to aim higher learn quickly and play to win in all you doquot Rick Murray managing partner and chief digital strategist at National Public Relations also wrote on FacebookWith Enrico39s death the ranks of cola warriors has thinned again less than a month after the passing of Bill Backer a creative force behind the 1971 quotHilltopquot commercial for Coke Donald Keough who helped steer CocaCola through the New Coke debacle died last year while we lost both Dusenberry and Pottasch in 2007And these days the Cola Wars are more like a skirmish what with the demonization of sugared soft drinks and how consumers are far more interested in new smartphones than new sodas Still Enrico may have been interested in familiarizing a new generation with the era when Pepsi clashed with Coke I understand he was working on an idea for a TV series or film with the tentative title of quotFizz Dispatches From the Cola WarsquotThe opinions and points of view expressed in this commentary are exclusively the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet Inc management or associated bloggers

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Stuart Elliott: Roger Enrico and the Cola Wars

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